0.4 Discussion  (Page 15/23)

Assignments in the humanities and social sciences are more often essays than problems with a right or wrong answer. All of the participants in this study used essay questions as assessments. Grading of essays requires a subjective assessment by the instructor. Therefore the grading system built into the program could not work for all assignments. It was built on a test bank of multiple choice questions covering each chapter. While weekly multiple choice quizzes may ensure that the students have read the chapter, they may not show in as comprehensive a way that the students have integrated the new knowledge as an essay question would. When the textbook author explained this to the publisher, Intellipro did create a way for students to submit essays from within the website. Still, there was no accommodation for adding grades from these assignments to the automatic grading component.

Reasons for technology avoidance

The tendency for instructors to avoid certain online components in Online Day can be attributed to three major reasons. First, many did not have the time to try out all of the components and discover all the resources offered that they could build into their courses. Second, most of the instructors and their students had experience with a course management system, and felt frustration in learning to use a new one that worked differently. And third, they had to learn how to incorporate the new resources into their course designs. This meant they had to create new assignments and ways of assessing them.

Nancy did not use the online resources with her students. She decided not to adopt the Online Day materials the following semester, but to return to the textbook she had taught with before. She summed up her experience:

It really looked good when I had it demonstrated, but once again, I didn’t have the time to put in to figure it out. Especially when I realized the students weren’t going to have access, I didn’t want to have an unlevel [sic] playing field with the students.

A number of Nancy’s students lived in rural areas where high-speed Internet connection was not available. This meant that they could not watch the streaming videos, which was the most appealing element of Online Day to Nancy. Because of this technical difficulty and because of being pressed for time, Nancy decided not to use Online Day the following semester, but to return to her old familiar textbook she had used before.

The instructors expected Online Day to look and act like course management systems they were already familiar with (i.e.--WebCT or Blackboard). Because there are no industry standards for interfaces, the interface most widely subscribed to becomes the standard by default. The instructors felt it was a waste of their time and their students’ time to have to learn both Blackboard or WebCT and a new application which is different, but basically does the same thing.

Carrie articulated this difficulty when she was struggling about whether or not to keep using Online Day for her summer course, before she worked out a compromise with the technology support expert: